


eyes wide open when you're dreaming

by starrywrite



Category: On My Block (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Character Turned Into a Ghost, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Season/Series 01, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 11:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20081680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starrywrite/pseuds/starrywrite
Summary: She doesn’t apologize for bleeding on Cesar’s floor.





	eyes wide open when you're dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> it’s not halloween yet but here’s a ghost story ^_^
> 
> warning for explicit mentions of survivor’s guilt, a scene involving a gun, and implied attempted self medicating 
> 
> btw this is not romantic cesar/olivia, their relationship is strictly platonic!
> 
> title comes from "wake up" by eden <3
> 
> hope u enjoy!!!

Sometimes, Cesar wakes up and Olivia is sitting on the edge of his bed. Her once white quince dress is now a rustic pick-tinted disaster as blood drips from her chest and onto his bed sheets. He’s paralyzed with fear when he sees her, his body cold as shock settles into his bones, his breathing as labored as her’s as she tells him stories of heaven and hell. Sometimes when she visits him, she tells him it wasn’t his fault; she tells him she still loves him. Other times, she’s not as kind. 

* * *

**i.**

Cesar isn’t sure what wakes him up, the god awful screaming playing like a song on repeat in the throws of his subconscious or the bone chilling sensation of fingertips gliding like skates on ice against his skin.

A gasp chokes him into consciousness, his body jolting with shock, as if a bucket of cold water was thrown on him. Tremors course through every muscle as he takes a moment to catch his breath, the feeling of sleep still so fresh that he isn’t even sure if he’s really awake yet. There’s movement beside him and he rolls over to face the figure laying next to him. He feels tulle scratch his legs before he notices the mass of ebony hair, the glint and glow of something shiny and silver despite the dark. 

“Olivia,” he breathes, because he’s still tangled up in sleep that he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s still a dream. “Oh, Olivia. I dreamt you died.”

A crystalline tear rolls down her beautiful face. He aches to reach out and comfort her, but he’s just so tired. Cesar closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them, she’s gone - but there’s a small tear stain on his sheets. He’s too tired to realize that it isn’t his. 

* * *

**ii.**

Cesar thought that finally being able to sleep in his own bed again would make the nightmares stop, but for whatever reason they’ve only become more vivid. Some nights, it’s as if Olivia’s actually in his room with him, her body corporeal once again but something about her is always off. Whether it’s the way she’s so pale that she’s almost transparent or the look in her eyes that doesn’t resemble anything human, she looks like Olivia but at the same time she doesn’t. She’s always in her quince dress when Cesar sees her, most of the time it’s stained with blood that pours out of the bullet-shaped hole in her chest that shouldn’t have been there to begin with. She doesn’t apologize for bleeding on Cesar’s floor. 

The first time she touched him, Cesar felt like he was being burned alive. Her hands were so cold they hurt, her voice even colder it felt like she was taking all of the warmth out of his room with every breath she took. He was shivering, he was aching. He didn’t even realize he was screaming until his brother ran into his room, the gun he sleeps with under his mattress locked and loaded in his hand. But when Oscar finds him tangled up in his blankets, tears streaming down his face, and just assumes he had a nightmare. Cesar wishes it was a nightmare. 

* * *

**iii.**

Some nights, she’s cruel and he doesn’t know what’s worse; a manifestation he cannot explain of his best friend telling him everything he fears the most, or the fact that he believes he deserves it. One night, she sits at the edge of his bed, Oscar’s gun in her hands. Cesar stares, breathless and trembling, and she tells him in a voice full of malice, “This is how it felt, you know? This is what it was like that night.” 

He cries and she tells him, “ I could do it, you know,” the casualness of the conversation contradicting the look in her eye, the venom on her lips. Evil isn’t a good look on an angel like her. “No one would know it was me. No one can see me but you. All they would see is a dead kid and a smoking gun in his bed.” 

“Olivia,” he chokes out, not knowing what else to say. Tears stream down his face, clouding his vision and making it hard for him to see her. He prefers it this way; he doesn’t want to remember her this way. 

“It’s not like I wouldn’t be doing everyone a favor,” she continues and he sobs. Her voice sounds like every thought that ever entered the back of his mind, even before she started visiting him like this. “A world without you in it, messing everything up. Maybe then I’d still be alive.”

“Stop,” he sobs. “Just stop, _please_.” It’s hard to differentiate what’s a nightmare and what’s actually happening anymore. He wants to believe that Olivia doesn’t feel this way but when it comes down to it, he doesn’t know what to believe anymore. 

* * *

**iv.**

Some nights, she whispers to him, her voice like a lullaby he can barely hear over his cries. “I never blamed you,” she tells him. “I have nothing to forgive you for because it wasn’t your fault.” It’s nights like these when she feels the most real, or as real as she could ever feel. Every touch leaves him with tingles in his skin; when she speaks it’s like electricity is in the air. It’s nights like this where she’s the Olivia he remembers -- sweet, kind, beautiful, understanding. It’s nights like this that hurt the most. 

“It should’ve been _me_,” he sobs to her, and she gently shushes him, her hand moving to stroke his cheek. He shivers at the contact but it leaves him feeling warm. “It - it should’ve been _me_. I _wish_ it had been me. It’s all my fault.”

“Cesar, baby, please,” she pleads with him and it’s like a knife twisting in his gut. He hates that he’s doing this to her. “I promise you, it wasn’t your fault. No one blames you, least of all me. I just wish you’d believe me.”

He wants to, he’s trying to. But how can believe she’s forgiven him if he can’t even forgive himself? 

* * *

**v.**

“I miss you,” he tells her. There are nights when he can’t sleep no matter how exhausted he is and she visits him. Sometimes he calls for her, sometimes she just shows up because she knows. Either way, he’s grateful for her company. And a little terrified of it. 

He wraps himself up in blankets so he can lay as close to her as possible without risking hypothermia. Nose to nose, they face each other. She whispers, “I miss you too.” Her voice is as soft as the wind. “I miss all of you. So, so much.” 

He tells her stories about the fam, how everyone has been holding up. He tells her about Ruby’s panic attacks, how he’s managed to overcome them for the most part but still flinches when life gets to be too loud. He tells her how Monse sleeps with one of her shirts because it still smells like her, even after all of the times she’s cried into it. He tells her that Jamal has been so supportive, how he’s been their rock, but Cesar still worries about him. He tells her how none of them have forgotten her. He tells her that even with all the time that has passed, it still hurts like an open wound. 

She tells him that their wounds will heal one day. He reminds her that they’ll always have the scars. 

* * *

**vi.**

A handful of pills greet him when he gets home, white ovals with XANAX 0.25 imprinted on each of them rest on his dresser. Cesar’s stomach sinks when he sees them. A note with the words _‘don’t take more than one a day. let me know if you need more’_ scrawled in his brother’s sloppy handwriting rests beneath the pile. Oscar must’ve heard him last night, or maybe the night before, or any night as of recent. He probably thinks his brother is crazy; if he’s not screaming from night terrors he’s talking to someone they both know is dead. Shit. 

* * *

**vii.**

He doesn’t take Oscar’s pills. Maybe he should’ve, but he doesn’t. Because maybe he is crazy. Maybe he’s losing his mind. 

Or maybe this is the universe’s weird, fucked up way of trying to help him get through this. Or punish him. 

Maybe he really is being haunted by the ghost of his dead best friend. 

Whatever the reason this is happening, the fact remains that it’s happening. And Cesar gradually accepts Olivia’s presence in his life once again. 

It’s easier than he thought it would be, to find himself okay with Olivia being back -- whether she’s haunting him or if he’s hallucinating. Because it feels normal; the way she talks to him as if she’s still alive. Sometimes he can even look past the way she almost appears translucent, or how whenever he sees her she’s always wearing her quince dress with blood stains soaked into the fabric. He can get over the fact that if anyone were walk into his room, all they would see is him staring off into space and talking to himself. He doesn’t know why he’s the only one who’s been able to see Olivia -- then again, it’s not like he’s running to his friends to tell them what’s been going on, so if something similar were happening to them, it wouldn’t surprise him if they weren’t talking about it. But there’s a part of him, a very selfish part, that’s hopeful it’s only him who can see and talk to her. Because there are only so many more nights he can spend wondering if he did the right or wrong thing. Because he needs to hear her be the one to tell him that he did the right or wrong thing. Because he needs to know what to do, or how to be okay again, or how he’s supposed to go on knowing he’s lost one of the most important people in his life. He’s lost a lot of people but nothing prepared him for something like this. 

“It isn’t fair,” he tells her once night. There’s so much he wants to say but he has a feeling she knows without him even telling her. 

“It’s not,” she agrees. “But you know, C, bad shit happens all the time, sometimes for no reason or sometimes for a really shitty reason. But just because there’s bad it doesn’t mean there’ll never be good again.”

“There won’t be,” he replies, tortured and pained. “You took it all with you when you left.” 

Olivia’s eyes are wet with unshed tears and she reaches to take his hand, though it just feels like a chill of cold air around his fingers. “There will be,” she says, determined and stern. “Because you are a good person who deserves good things. And maybe you’ll never believe me, but I swear it’s true.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and when he speaks up, his voice breaks with emotion when he says to her, “I wish it had been me.”

He has to look away, not wanting to see the tears fall down her face. Not wanting to see her crying because of him. “I know you do,” she says. “But it wasn’t you. And you can’t spend your life letting yourself rot with guilt or suffering because you think it’s what you deserve. There’s a whole world out there that you aren’t letting yourself experience but you should. If not for you, then for me.” Cesar imagines she’s squeezing his hand because the chill seeps into his bones and aches but he doesn’t dare to move his hand away. “I love you, Cesar. Nothing, not even death, can stop me from loving you.” He bites his lip to choke back a sob. “And I know you still love me.”

“I’ll never stop loving you,” he promises because he can’t imagine not loving her. 

She nods. “Then if you love me,” she says. “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

“Anything,” he says immediately.

“Live,” she tells him, her voice swirling around his bedroom like an echo existing in a cave. He wasn't sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. Yet it’s all she asks of him. “Just live, Cesar. For me.”

Slowly, he nods his head, and he vows to her that he will.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on tumblr @ ‘creativityprince’ !!!


End file.
